Refrigeration and Sanitation are Winners

If you want to appreciate modern life-- and I'm talking about modern life, not our post-modern lives on the internet-- then you can either read Robert J. Gordon's fantastic and comprehensive book The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War or you could go without a refrigerator for three weeks.

I've done both. I prefer the Gordon book.

Gordon argues that the tech revolution is less important than the five great inventions that turned the dark, damp, cold, and smoky house of the 1870s into the modern house of the 1940s. 

These are the big five:

1) electricity

2) urban sanitation

3) chemicals and pharmaceuticals 

4) modern travel (the internal combustion engine and plane travel) 

5) modern communication

We just got our new fridge yesterday, and it's amazing. Big, cold inside, and easy to shut tightly. It makes ice and preserves food. We got a Frigidaire because that's what Steve the Appliance Doctor recommended. Our old fridge had a bottom drawer freezer and he said those are the kiss-of-death for the compressor. It easy to leave them cracked open, and then the compressor has to work really hard to push the cold air up to the fridge.

Of course, this was a first-world problem, as we had a small refrigerator/freezer in the basement. But you had to descend a flight of stairs, and really bend down to get to the tiny vegetable drawers. And no ice. 

Refrigeration and air-conditioning are miracles that allow you to enjoy all the internet can provide. Without them, you couldn't be inside your house in the summer. Grid electricity and urban sanitation are particularly nice when its 95 degrees and you are holed up because of a pandemic.

We've also been living without an upstairs show-- contractors are replacing the bathroom tiles. We had a leak. So we've all been using the shower in the basement . . . we'll appreciate all our urban sanitation once we get that back.

These technological advances have allowed for humans to enjoy incredible population density and incredible ease of global movement. Population density creates the most vibrant and creative places in the world: cities. The freedom to travel allows us to move from city to city, like little gods of the planet.

 

The cost of this density and ability to travel is the pandemic. 

So it looks like we're going to need a technological solution to COVID-19. If you don't think so . . . if you've got delusions of naturally reaching herd immunity, stop watching random people on YouTube and listen to Short Wave: Why Herd Immunity Won't Save Us . . . it's a credible and vetted science podcast that explains what we know about COVID, herd immunity, and Sweden's experiment.

In other news, I can't wait until the contractors are done. It's hard for me to read, nap, blog and otherwise be lazy when people are working so hard in my house (I did work pretty hard at soccer practice this morning, coaching in the heat with a mask on, but that was only for three hours).